Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

throughout the world. 27 Mexican comics are no exception. 28 Hence, when I look at the
examples and argue that a character was expressing that he/she was upset, yelling,
whispering, or that something was about to collapse, I was following these graphic
conventions. 29 Constant examples of inarticulate sounds appear in La Familia Burrón.
When Borola physically fights with someone, we read words such as cuas, chin, pon,
crash, and we understand that she is fighting even if the frame does not show the
confrontation itself. 30 Nevertheless, it was important to see the style, particularities and
recurrences in each comic. Rius uses bold fonts when someone is yelling, but also when
he wants us to pay careful attention to a fact, and (like other artists) he writes in brackets
a character’s whisper.
The second element is images which give information about someone’s feelings
or way of thinking, or provide details about the mood of a place. They are visual
metaphors, 31 images which are included in the frame and can be inside or outside the
balloons. Their function is to express something related with the state of mind or the
feelings of the characters. They can be also understood as symbols which represent the
invisible. 32 Some classic visual metaphors include smoke coming from the ears when a
character eats something hot or spicy, or a broken heart when they suffer in love. An
example can be found in the issue in which Ruperto Tacuche is tortured and I asserted
that he was electrocuted because of the broken lines around his body. I also
27 Gubern, El lenguaje de… p. 154.
28 According to Armando Bartra, it was in the late 1920s when the Mexican comics adopted the format of
the US comics and in the late 1930s and early 1940s when they also assumed the US conventions in the
language of comics. Armando Bartra, ‘Debut, beneficio y despedida de una narrativa tumultuaria. Piel de
papel. Los pepines en la educación sentimental del mexicano’, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios
sobre la Historieta, 1.2 (2001). < http://www.rlesh.110mb.com/02/02_bartra.html> [accessed 11 October
2010]
29 Many of these conventions can be found in Gasca, Román Gubern, El discurso del comic.
30 That is the case in Gabriel Vargas, La Familia Burrón, 2 December 1973, 17167, p. 21.
31 Scott McCloud groups the visual metaphors and inarticulate sounds under the concept of pictorial icons
(Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (USA: Harper Perennial, 1993), pp. 26-27, and Mario Saraceni
considers them as symbols and icons, (The Language of…, p. 15-27). Gubern is more specific by naming
the concept inarticulate sounds.
32 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (USA: Harper Perennial, 1993), p.129.
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